An achievable throughput at which users may download or access different types of content at various locations and times is a very important metric to service providers. Being privy to such knowledge enables the services providers to more effectively provision additional capacity in a particular region of a network of the service provider and/or at particular times in the network. Currently, a variety of different methods and systems exist for measuring download rates and/or throughput in a network. For example, current techniques for measuring throughput involve periodically downloading large files from a number of active probes while measuring their achieved throughput. However, such a test places substantial loads on the network being examined, may not necessarily represent the actual experiences that users undergo, and are often expensive to deploy and maintain. Accordingly, such active tests often are not representative of a portion of a network, and in particular, a wireless network.